Vatican City – A cardinal has broken his vow of secrecy and released his diary describing the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI, revealing in an exceedingly rare account that a cardinal from Argentina was the main challenger and almost blocked Benedict’s election.
Excerpts of the diary, published Friday, show Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger led in each of the four ballots cast in the Sistine Chapel during the mystery- shrouded April 18-19 conclave.
But, in a surprise, Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio, a Jesuit, was in second place the whole time.
Most accounts of the conclave have said that retired Milan Archbishop Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini was the main challenger and that a Third World pope was never realistically in the running.
While Bergoglio never threatened Ratzinger’s lead – and made clear he didn’t want the job, according to the diary published in the respected Italian foreign affairs magazine Limes – his runner-up status could signal the next conclave might elect a pope from Latin America, home to half the world’s 1 billion Roman Catholics.
The diary of the anonymous cardinal also is significant because it shows Ratzinger didn’t garner a huge margin – he had 84 of the 115 votes in the final ballot, seven more than the required two-thirds majority.
His two immediate predecessors, Pope John Paul II and Pope John Paul I, are believed to have garnered 99 and 98 votes, respectively, and that was when there were only 111 voting cardinals.
The diary also reveals a surprising vote in the final ballot for Cardinal Bernard Law, forced to resign as Boston archbishop because of the church sex abuse scandal.
